Firecrawl Alternative: How I Cut Scraping Costs by 90%
Blog post from Freestyle
A developer of The Movie Watch, an app that helps users find tickets to sold-out films, replaced Firecrawl and Scrape.do with a self-hosted Python scraping service on a Freestyle virtual machine using an Evomi residential proxy. They report reducing monthly scraping costs from about $1,000 to roughly $100 while improving recorded median fetch latency from 9.2 seconds with Scrape.do to 3.9 seconds with the self-managed setup. Unlike Firecrawl’s hosted API, which supplies built-in extraction formats and managed configuration, the self-hosted approach requires deploying and maintaining scraping code but provides control over browser choice, parsing, retries, and proxy routing. The proposed implementation uses Playwright with Chromium to render JavaScript-heavy pages, route traffic through proxy credentials stored in environment variables or Freestyle’s SOCKS5 support, and expose an API for the application to call.
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